Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi returned to the breathtaking Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk for its 16th year, when the exhibition opened from 18 October to 4 November, 2012. The world’s largest annual free-to-the-public outdoor sculpture exhibition featured over 100 new works from Australian and international artists, with nearly half of this year’s artists exhibiting at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi for the first time.

Half a million visitors visited the iconic coastline to enjoy a variety of works from 49 New South Wales sculptors, 28 interstate artists and 36 international artists from China, Denmark, England, Germany, Iceland, India, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Spain and the US. Artists experienced their inaugural exhibition at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi include talented emerging Australian artist duo Rachel Couper and Ivana Kuzmanovska and NSW based Hidemi Tokutake. An exciting array of established international artists made their debut including United States artist Rico Eastman, Karin van der Molen from The Netherlands, China's Zhang Yangen and Soren Lyngbye from Denmark.

The annual sculpture exhibition also featured works from the three recipients of the prestigious 2012 Helen Lempriere Scholarships; Lou Lambert (WA), Philip Spelman (ACT) and Tom de Munk-Kerkmeer (WA). The scholarships of $30, 000 were awarded as part of the Helen Lempriere Bequest, a charitable trust managed by Perpetual with the purpose of assisting sculptors to further their artistic development. The recipients of this year’s Clitheroe Foundation Emerging Sculptor Mentor relationships are Aaron Anderson, Elyssa Sykes-Smith and Kate Stehr. The three emerging artists were awarded $10,000, to help establish meaningful mentor relationships with established sculptors by facilitating a skills exchange and providing a forum for professional and technical development. Works from two of the most renowned artists in the world, Sui Jianguo from China and Sir Anthony Caro OM, as well as leading Australian sculptors Ken Unsworth AM and Ron Robertson-Swann OAM had brought their works to Sculpture by the Sea. “It is so exciting to experience the creativity of over 100 artists and what they create for the exhibition from site specific works through to museum masterpieces,” said Founding Director David Handley.

This was the second time for Sui Jianguo to exhibit his work in Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi. His work dream stone 2010 was created from a beautiful stone which Jianguo found on the building site of World Expo. Through a series of scanning and computer processing, the stone was magnified several times larger and turned into a steel structure. The stone was then returned to the original site of which it was found. The rock was transformed, much like the building site, which is now the beautiful central axle of the World Expo. "I have no idea how I am here. What is in my mind is that I am from the remote mountain. The same as other numerous sands and stones along the Huangpu River," said Sui Jianguo.

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ABOUT SCULPTURE BY THE SEA

Transforming Sydney’s Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk each spring, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi began in 1997, as a one-day exhibition featuring works by 64 artists and attended by 25,000 visitors. Since then, the event has grown to include works from various esteemed international artists and is now enjoyed by over 500,000 visitors. Sculpture by the Sea is an international series of exhibitions presented at Cottesloe Beach in Perth, Western Australia from 8 to 25 March 2013 and in the city of Aarhus in Denmark in 2013.

AN INTRODUCTION TO SCULPTURE BY THE SEA, BONDI 2012

By Harry Nicolson

Written by Harry Nicolson, author of the catalogue introduction to the first Biennale of Sydney in 1973. The sixteenth Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, is really a sequel to an already established successful series of fifteen annual exhibitions that place the emphasis on sculpture alone and spatially apart from the other arts and crafts in the State Art Galleries and the State and federally sponsored Biennale of Sydney. This year’s exhibition continues to show many different kinds of modern sculpture and draws from more countries than ever. This confirms that a revolution has been brought about: never before in Australia have so many joined in an exhibition just devoted to sculpture and in a sustained way. Just as some of us look forward to well produced anthologies of poetry every year, so we look forward to this annual showing on the ledges of cliffs, beach sands and rocks at the edge of the sea.

Modernity has many aspects. In architecture, the home of most sculpture in the past, the rapid growth of geometric high-rise buildings has largely driven sculpture out of the city or dwarfed it despite attempts in the 1970?s and more recently to encourage public art. Some small corners retain memorable works and a few atriums or entrance halls display specially arranged sculpture. Our suburbs provide less space for private sculpture and most builders try to conform at least on the outside and not to attract special attention. To get away from busy and regulated places Sydney-siders turn among other things to the beaches and cliff walks and here they are glad to find beauty and interest in unusual things, markings on rocks, shells and pools. What a wonderful place for ocean and sky backgrounds. In such places people can fulfill the need to explore and think about complex objects in the spaces closely related to them. This is the province of sculpture – the organization of mass material in space that is close to us. The last period of popular sculpture in open spaces in Australia was the second half of the nineteenth century when great public gardens and city squares were filled with statues of men, women, children and animals, mainly ideal types or admired genre. During the twentieth century they were often neglected or thought to be “old hat.” The only truly popular sculpture in the twentieth century was in the war memorials, culminating in the much-discussed panels on the Hyde Park War Memorial and to a certain extent fountains.

An area of interest in the sculptures of Sculpture by the Sea is in the materials as they relate to man. Even when a body is portrayed directly it is by an unusual combination of materials making it seem artificial: two works most significantly suggest presence by absence; the silhouette of a body appears in an archway made with alternating layers of stone and, in another, stones cut fairly regularly have a split junction roughly like two bodies touching and stones proportional to the head, body and legs division of humans.

Ingenuity is the keynote of most works. It involves finding key places along the walkway for the works. There are some that need to stand against the sky because of the transparent character of the materials, there are others that bed down among plants, others like animals made of unusual material or rocks where they look about to move.

Perhaps the keystone piece of the exhibition is Sir Anthony Caro’s Eastern which is composed of massive steel sections in a cubist manner, making an impressive frontal composition. There are many other steel sculptures using the composition methods that he pioneered. At the other end of the scale there are some that use alphabet letters to fit literal meanings, pranks using public notices, even street signs, as well as outright symbolic forms. There are constructivist structures, and some slightly extending the conventional views of sculpture towards buildings or architecture and even a flying machine. Although bronze, marble and stone are still in use, the variety of materials and the variety of visual arrangements that bring out the unity of the works will fascinate by their ingenuity. Man may be no longer the chief subject of the sculpture but all these works are evidence of sculptor’s desire to be a master of material.

Provided by Anni Ma, Chinese Curatorial Advisor; Courtesy of the artists and  Sculpture by the Sea.